Tag Archives: literary crimes

So we’re watching this TV show last night, Primeval, and these two paleontologists, guys who dig up and study fossils, suddenly grab a pair of motorbikes and dart all around the parking garage, chasing and being chased by raptors. They just know how to maneuver a motorbike at high speed among parked cars. In fact, they just know how to do wheelies. Both of them know these things. Instinctively. Up until that point in the series, we never saw hide nor hair of motorbikes. And now they’re doin’ wheelies. It’s very effective against raging dinosaurs.

How many times have we seen this in movies and TV shows? Some wispy little Barbie snatches up a .50-caliber machine gun and mows down the zombies. Joe Hero jumps into an unguarded helicopter and just takes off. Heavy machinery, high technology, advanced weapons systems–it’s all the same. Whatever special ability is suddenly called for in the script, the character in that scene has it. No one ever just doesn’t know what to do! “Old man Can’t is dead!”

Pity me. If I were being chased by Velociraptors, you could have 50 motorbikes parked in a row and I wouldn’t know how even to get one started, let alone zoom around like Steve McQueen, doin’ wheelies. First I would have to be taught. Then I’d have to practice. No time for that in a movie!

I consider this a literary crime, and pledge myself to try as hard as I can to avoid committing it in any of my novels. Your money back if I can’t do it!

I keep saying “Christian fiction” has to be at least as good as, and preferably better than, ordinary secular fiction. But I read so much “Christian” stuff that isn’t, I’m beginning to think no one believes me.

Thing is, more and more people nowadays behave like space aliens! I mean, would genuine earth people sit together around a table, on the sidewalk outside the pizza parlor, and instead of talking with each other, just sit there transfixed by some electronic doodad? (Please say I’m right.)

It’s sort of a pet peeve of mine, the business of pumping up an inferior product by calling it “Christian” and trying to make Christians feel guilty for not buying it. We see this a lot in publishing and “entertainment.”

It’s not that secular novels, movies, and TV scripts set impossibly high artistic standards that Christians can never hope to equal. Overall, those standards ought to be fairly easy to beat. Christian artists must try harder.

This is the illiterate feminist knock-off of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries. If you were creating a dictionary of literary errors and prat falls, it would very closely resemble this disaster, St. Brigid’s Bones.

Gassex the Crusty But Benign Old Wizard who talks like a text message.

Clairol the Buxom Tavern Wench, always up for a good time.

The Duke of Pez, villainous beyond belief, with a castlefull of monsters.

Solgar the Strong, the drop-dead gorgeous Hunk, Invincible Male Warrior with this really thick neck, it’s hard to tell where his head begins, who does jumpin’, spinnin’ kicks.

Plus a multitude of drop-dead gorgeous know-it-all Elves, insatiably lusty Dwarves, and all sorts of supporting characters who have absolutely no morals and commit all manner of revolting crimes.

Because, you see, in A Throne of Games, everyone’s bad–unless they’re, like, this total victim who’ll be lucky to survive two pages–and so the reader doesn’t have to decide who to root for, he can just sit back and enjoy the sex and carnage. In fact, these characters are so loathsome, even I’m turned off. Whose idea was it to get me to write this garbage? Well, confound it, I won’t! And I am withdrawing those movie and TV offers as of this confounded minute!

Back when every word I wrote got rejected, it used to drive me plum crazy to see all the howlingly awful books that were being published. Even some of the best-sellers! Stories that made no sense. Prose that read like a six-year-old wrote it. Stuff that read like a space alien wrote it, after taking a two-hour course on how to imitate humans.

Like this:

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a fantasy, a murder mystery, or any other kind of novel. The surest way to gum it up is to have an agenda besides just telling the story.

Yesterday we watched an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit because Amanda Plummer had an award-winning part in it, playing a schizophrenic who’d been the victim of a sexual assault. She was good, all right, although the rest of the acting was kind of wooden and mechanical: sort of like what you’d expect from Hollywood screenwriters who think, “This is the way New York cops talk–like puppets.”

But what was really wrong with it was the show’s fetish for “diversity.” Because of a need to represent every identity group in New York, the script had to accommodate a bewildering parade of characters–and even then they left out African pygmies and transgender types. The story staggered under its burden of identity politics, and we got the impression that watching this show on a regular basis could get quite tiresome.

“Oh! But this or that group will be offended if we don’t include a character representing it! We’ve got to be inclusive!”

You can’t tell any kind of worthwhile story if you’re standing on a soapbox.